"Natural Light Cloaking for Aquatic and Terrestrial Creatures" - 3 views
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johannessimon81 on 12 Jun 13Cheap and scalable invisibility cloaks being developed. The setup is so trivial that I would almost call it a "trick" (as in "Magicians trick"): 6 prisms of n=1.78 glass. Nontheless, it does the job of cloaking an object at visible wavelengths and from several directions.
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Dario Izzo on 13 Jun 13can we build one?
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johannessimon81 on 13 Jun 13Yes, I just did :-) It is on my desk
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johannessimon81 on 13 Jun 13New video here (smaller file than previous): "https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/58527156/20130613_101701.mp4" Note how close to the center of the field of view the hidden objects are. I am quite surprised that such poor lenses create such a sharp focus.
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Thijs Versloot on 13 Jun 13Well.. I would say that it is not "fully cloaking", as the image behind is mirrored as well
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johannessimon81 on 13 Jun 13That just means that you have to double the setup, i.e., put 4 glasses in a row. Of course the obvious drawback is that you can only look at this cloak from one direction.
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Dario Izzo on 13 Jun 13and here is the same for bigger things http://cosmiclog.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/06/07/18831348-this-invisibility-cloak-could-conceal-satellites-or-hide-your-kids?lite
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Luzi Bergamin on 14 Jun 13Is this really new? I don't know, but I know that the original idea of cloaking was pretty different. When cloaking as an application of transformation optics became popular people tried to make devices that work for any incidence angle, any polarization and in full wave optics (not just ray approximation). This is really hard to achieve and I guess that the people that tried to make such devices knew exactly that the task becomes almost trivial by dropping at least two of the three conditions above.
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johannessimon81 on 14 Jun 13I think it is very easy to call something trivial when you're not the one who invested considerable time (5 min in my case) to design a cloaking device and fill the coffee mugs with water... Also, I did not really violate that many conditions: true I reduced the number of dimensions in which the device works to 1 (as opposed to the 2 dimensions of many metamaterial cloaks). However the polarization should not be affected in my setup as well as the wave phase and wave vector (so it works in full wave optics) - apart maybe from the imperfect lens distortion, but hey I was improvising.